One on One | All stories

Our guest for One on One this week is Pavel Maurer, who is arguably the Czech Republic’s best known and most influential gourmet. Besides establishing the highly successful Prague Food Festival, which every year gives people a chance to sample the fare of the Czech capital’s best restaurants for rock-bottom prices, Pavel Maurer is also the man behind the highly respected Grand Restaurant guide.

Roman Zuzuk is a Ukrainian born artist who runs a gallery with his brother Miroslav in Prague's Mala Strana. Roman studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kiev, and came to Prague in 1991 to begin painting professionally. His work features colourful dreamscapes and illogical scenarios, musical themes and interaction between humans and animals. Roman lived in Prague until January 2000 and now resides in Toronto, Canada. He comes back here every year to visit the city, and his gallery. That's where I caught up with him a few days ago.

From his office in the Prague district of Zizkov, Petr Litos runs a company making mobile phone games for both the Czech and international markets. In fact, his firm Nostromo successfully exports mobile entertainment to the whole of central and eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Scandinavia and Turkey (and in some cases the whole world). When we met last week, I first asked Petr to name some of the big international franchises his 30-strong team have worked with.

Last week the best-known living Czech author, Milan Kundera, was awarded the State Prize for Literature. The award sparked plenty of debate about the 78-year-old writer, who's lived in France since the 1970s and rarely returns to his homeland; he was not present to collect the award, citing ill health. It was given for the Czech edition of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which was published in French in 1984 but not published in Czech - officially - until last year. Kundera's three most recent novels - published in French and translated into

Milos Cermak is one of the Czech Republic's leading newspaper columnists, and is a regular contributor to both the liberal daily Lidove noviny and the social affairs and arts magazine Reflex. When we spoke at his downtown Prague office last week topics included Czech journalistic standards, whether there really are orchestrated campaigns against politicians, and if Czech papers come under pressure from advertisers to report, or not report, in a certain way. But first Milos Cermak (who, by the way, is an exceedingly tall gentleman) told that he wasn't

Today's guest for One on One is Ales Brezina, the head of the Bohuslav Martinu Institute in Prague. Mr. Brezina has spent the last twelve years compiling, annotating and publicizing the work of Martinu - perhaps the greatest Czech composer of the 20th century. But that's not all he's been up to. Mr. Brezina is a composer in his own right, providing the soundtrack for films such as 'Musime si pomahat' (or 'Divided We Fall') by Jan Hrebejk, and Jiri Menzel's 'Obsluhoval jsem anglickeho krale' ('I served the King of England'). As if that wasn't enough,

Our guest for One on One this week is Nicholas Kirke, a British-born property developer who has been operating in the Czech Republic since the early 1990s and whose La Salle property development company now own thousands of square metres of prime real estate in Prague, including the historical Melantrich building on Wenceslas Square.

Our guest for One on One this week is Will Tizard an American journalist who has been based in Prague since 1994. Besides writing regularly for the Czech Republic's English-language newspaper The Prague Post, Will Tizard is also an editor for the prestigious Time Out city guide as well as the Czech and Slovak correspondent for the leading movie-industry publication Variety Magazine.

Jehan Harney is a journalist and filmmaker of Egyptian-American extraction. Over the last year, she has lived in Prague and taught journalism at the city's New Anglo-American College. During her time in the Czech Republic, Mrs. Harney developed an interest in the issues surrounding the enforced sterilization of Romany women. Subsequently, she made a documentary on just that theme, titled 'Sterile Dreams'. Jehan Harney is now back in the United States, but I caught up with her just before she left to ask her why she decided to make such a film:

My guest for One on One this week is Kristof Kintera, an award-winning artist whose work appears in many prestigious collections such as that of the Czech National Museum and the American Museum of Fine Arts. He has also sold many pieces to private Czech and foreign collectors. This 33-year-old sculptor and designer is something of an enfant terrible of the Czech art scene. His bizarre creations ranging from human figures made out of potatoes to depictions of household implements having sex are always daring and provocative in a manner reminiscent